Spark

by John Lutz

  Faravelli did nothing to assuage this. He was standing behind a massive, ornate desk and extending his hand for Carver to shake. Behind him was a wall that was all window, with narrow blinds tilted to alter the angle of the light but not to mute it. The rest of the walls were paneled like the hall, and the only decoration was a vast blowup of a color aerial photograph of Solartown. There was very little furniture in the office. All of it was expensive.

  Straining, Carver reached across the desk and shook Faravelli’s strong, dry hand. Squinting into the light he was sure was designed to make him do just that and feel at a disadvantage, he studied Faravelli. What he could see of him.

  The man in charge of Solartown development was about forty, average height, with thinning brown hair styled and parted on the side. His gray suit insistently whispered expensive, and there was a curious waxiness to his pale, regular features. He seemed to be only moments from suspended animation and display as an exhibit at a wax museum: American executive, circa 1990s. The sort who dressed for success down to his id.

  In a pleasant voice he said, “Velma tells me you’re a detective investigating a death in Solartown, Mr. Carver.”

  Carver confirmed that. He looked around for a place to sit down. There wasn’t any. Leaning forward with both hands on the crook of his cane, feeling like a performer about to tell lewd jokes, he said, “This won’t take much time. I came primarily to find out about Solartown’s reverse mortgage arrangement.”

  Faravelli politely remained standing himself, poised and smiling. “In what context?”

  Murder, Carver thought. He said, “Basically, how does the arrangement work?”

  Faravelli told him in concise terms what Val Green had said earlier.

  “Sounds like a profitable deal for Solartown,” Carver said, probing a little with the needle.

  Faravelli showed no reaction. “It can be a good deal either way. Certainly the company profits from it, but it enables us to sell homes to our retirees at prices below market value, then actually provide them with a monthly income. That we reacquire the property at the time of death doesn’t matter much to the residents. And why should it?”

  “What about the residents’ heirs?”

  Faravelli shrugged. Or his silhouette did, against the light angling through the blinds. “That’s family business, not ours. To tell you the truth, Mr. Carver, we’ve had a few lawsuits threatened by heirs who claimed the residents were taken advantage of. All of them were dropped before reaching the courts, because there was simply no basis on which the plaintiffs could have proceeded. The fact is that our reverse mortgage plan allows retirees to turn home equity into lifelong income and maintain a desirable place to live.” He extended his arms and flipped his hands palms up, as if to demonstrate there was nothing up his sleeves. “Is that such a bad thing?”

  Carver limped over to where he could look at Faravelli from an angle. He could see him better without the light in his eyes. The change in their relative positions seemed to irritate Faravelli, but only mildly. Carver said, “I suppose whether it’s a bad thing depends on the numbers.”

  Faravelli moved out from behind the desk. He had a smooth, controlled walk, like an athlete. He glanced at Carver’s cane as if regretting that he was dealing with a cripple and couldn’t get properly tough. Carver had seen that act before.

  “I don’t think I like the insinuation, Mr. Carver.”

  “No insinuation,” Carver said, limping slowly to the side, “just an observation.”

  “To be blunt,” Faravelli said, “I think you were implying that the reverse mortgage program is a confidence game run on the elderly.”

  Carver stopped his gradual sideways shuffle. The light was at his back now. Faravelli was squinting. “You seem sensitive on the subject,” Carver said.

  “I am!” Faravelli’s voice carried more anger than he’d intended. With an effort, he modulated it. “It annoys me that every time a corporation works to help the public, the effort is misinterpreted. People like you, the media, give business a bad name, and we don’t deserve it.”

  “Sometimes you don’t,” Carver admitted.

  Faravelli took a deep breath, then stalked back behind his desk. He picked up an elegant pearl-gray fountain pen and jotted something on a notepad. “I’m going to do you a favor, Mr. Carver,” he said as he wrote. He waved the gray memo paper a few times, then folded it in half and handed it to Carver. “Solartown is owned by five partners. This is a list of them. When you read it after leaving here, you’ll see that they’re hardly the type that would resort to a repugnant scam to make a few extra dollars.” He screwed the cap back on the pen; Carver saw that it was gold-trimmed and monogrammed in gold. Ah, the trappings of success. Faravelli probably read and understood everything in Forbes and Fortune.

  Carver tucked the folded paper into his shirt pocket and thanked Faravelli for his time. As he was limping toward the door, Faravelli said, “We sell houses to perfectly healthy couples in their fifties who might live well into their nineties. Think of that, Mr. Carver, whenever you consider a case like Maude Crane’s, where we reacquire the house after only a few years.”

  Carver turned around and said, “I’m surprised you’re aware of individual cases.”

  He couldn’t see Faravelli’s reaction, now that he’d returned to stand behind his desk. The old back-to-the-light trick again. Upwardly mobile jerkoff must have read all the success manuals. Make your visitor feel uncomfortable, inferior, easily manipulated. The manuals didn’t explain that it worked only on people who felt that way when they walked into the office. Other people it sometimes got mad. In some cases, suspicious.

  Faravelli continued to stand very still, not speaking. Enough of his busy day had been consumed by this minor and unpleasant digression.

  “Morning,” Carver said. “It’s been edifying.” He limped out the door.

  In the Olds he unfolded the thick gray notepaper on which Faravelli had identified the members of Solartown’s partnership.

  They weren’t names of people. In precise, slanted print, Faravelli had noted the names of an investment company, a retail clothing chain, a major bank, a lumber firm, and an insurance company. Most of them were names Carver recognized. Not at all the sort of partners that would devise what to them would be a penny-ante confidence game, not worth the effort, considering the ratio of profit to risk.

  Back at the Warm Sands, Carver called Beth’s room. She answered after five rings, and he wondered if she’d still been asleep. He’d known her to sleep till noon.

  He read Faravelli’s precise printing to her and asked her to find out what she could about Solartown and its investors.

  “ ’Bout time you gave me something to do,” she told him. “Where you gonna be, Fred?”

  He said, “Under rocks, mostly. Looking for Adam Beed.”

  17

  CARVER PARKED THE OLDS on Skyview Lane, three lots up from Lou Brethwaite’s rundown blue trailer. Skyview was aptly named, Carver decided, as the only view worth looking at in the trailer park just outside Orlando was the sky. Rows of single and double-wide trailers were connected by streets where grass and weeds had burst through the cracks into sunlight. Some of the trailers had decrepit wooden latticework around their bases so they resembled actual houses, but the wood had rotted away on Brethwaite’s trailer and the wheels showed like guilty secrets in the shadows beneath faded blue fiberglass and rust-stained steel.

  Except for a skinny young woman in a green T-shirt and baggy gray shorts, no one seemed to live on Skyview Lane. She let the screen door slam behind her on the trailer across the street from Brethwaite’s, sauntered out to get her mail from a metal box that looked like a lunchbucket on top of a crooked post, then scratched her left buttock and ambled back inside. She’d only glanced at Carver, revealing she had a black eye. The homes might have wheels, but life on Skyview Lane could be an inescapable trap.

  He climbed out of the Olds and limped toward Brethwaite’s trailer. There were
no sidewalks, and he had to be careful negotiating the slanted concrete street. After crossing the patch of weeds that passed for a front yard, he climbed three dangerous wooden steps, stood in the hot shade beneath a rusty blue and white metal awning, and knocked on the trailer door. It shook crookedly on its hinges, and the cloudy plastic that served as a window rattled noisily in its frame. Carver was afraid the opaque phony glass was going to fall out, but somehow it held. Maybe the way people here held onto life.

  “Who’s it?” called a voice from inside.

  “Police, F.B.I., D.E.A., and Publishers Clearing House,” Carver said. He knocked again, harder. The warped aluminum door shook like six kinds of Jell-O, all noisy.

  A moment passed, then the door slowly opened.

  Lou Brethwaite squinted out at Carver. He seemed shorter, thinner, with eyes that held nothing but pain. Carver had known him as an informer for the Orlando police. That was how Brethwaite managed to indulge his habit and stay out of prison. But the drugs were his personal prison, and he was dying there, faster now. “Fred Carver,” he said, as if christening Carver. “Thought I recognized your voice, even before I peeked out the window and seen it was you.”

  “You don’t look good, Lou,” Carver said. He didn’t mention that Brethwaite didn’t smell good, either. The air moving from inside the trailer felt hotter than outside, and it carried the stench of sweat and urine and spicy fried food. A radio or television was on inside the trailer, tuned to a Braves game.

  “I been sleeping,” Brethwaite said. “You should catch me when I’m dressed to go out and I got a fresh haircut.” He ran dirty fingernails through his thinning black hair. He was wearing a blue denim work shirt and incredibly wrinkled gray slacks, no shoes. A man in his twenties who could pass for forty. “Guess you’re waiting for me to invite you in, huh?”

  “Why don’t you step out?” Carver said. “Cooler out here.”

  “Guess it is. Air conditioner’s been busted the past month.” Inside the trailer, somebody hit a double. The crowd was roaring as Brethwaite let the door slam shut.

  Carver stepped down into the yard to give Brethwaite room to plod down the sagging stairs. Brethwaite stepped on a fat palmetto bug with his bare foot, but he didn’t seem to notice nearly as much as the insect. Carver looked away.

  “It ain’t so bad seeing you now you’re not a cop,” Brethwaite said. “Been what, about three, four years?”

  “About,” Carver said. “I need some information, Lou.”

  Brethwaite smiled. There were more gaps in his yellowed teeth than when Carver had last seen him, not three or four years ago but last year, stoned in a bar in downtown Orlando. Still, cleaned up, after a trip to the dentist, he would have been a good-looking guy, one you’d be happy to see hanging around your sister. If you didn’t know what he carried in his pockets. “I figured you didn’t drop by to talk baseball, Mickey, and the Duke,” he told Carver.

  Carver said, “Some things never change.”

  Brethwaite sniffed with obvious pain, brushed at his nose with a knuckle, then examined his hand as if looking for blood. All he might see there was part of his disappearing future. Still doing coke. “That being the case, I expect you wanna pay for this information.”

  “A hundred in it for you, if it’s good,” Carver said. The sun, the smell, were beginning to get to him. He wanted to get this over with and go where it was fresh and cool. “I’m looking for a man named Adam Beed.”

  “No, don’t do that,” Brethwaite said. He frowned and spat off to the side. There was blood in his spittle. Some of it dribbled down onto his chin. “He’s a fella best not found.”

  “Nevertheless,” Carver said.

  “Yeah. Well, I won’t pretend I ain’t scared to tell you, but it don’t matter how I feel, ’cause I don’t know where you might latch onto Beed.”

  Carver drew two fifty-dollar bills from his pocket and held them creased over his forefinger.

  Brethwaite glanced at the bills and gave his yellow smile. “Keep your hundred, stay alive, I’ll stay alive, that’s the best way this conversation can go. Beed’s a genuine through-an’-through bad-ass, Carver, Last I heard he was outa prison and on booze so as to stay legal and not violate parole.”

  “He’s broken parole. Otherwise I’d be able to find him.”

  “Well, running out on your parole officer’s not the best play, but that’s not the same as chancing going back behind the walls on a drug charge. Beed got clean enough in prison that he’s an alky now.” Again the ruined smile. “It’s a more socially acceptable substance, not to mention legal, but despite the fact he’s a physical fitness freak, he’s just as addicted as ever and eventually it’ll take him down. An addict’s an addict, legal drug or not. I don’t shit myself or anybody else about that. Thing is, Beed don’t run in any of his old circles these days. That’s why I can’t tell you where you might find him, or even who else might know.”

  Carver slipped the hundred into his pocket, watching Brethwaite stare at it until it disappeared. He was wasted and dying and needed the money; he was telling the truth.

  “You ever consider going into a rehab program, Lou?” Carver asked. Had Oprah Winfrey ever considered a diet?

  “I’m on a waiting list. Been on it for eight months.” Staring down at his dirty bare feet, Brethwaite sniffled again and said, “I do have something for you might be worth one of them fifties.”

  Carver pulled out one of the bills and held it between thumb and forefinger. He knew Brethwaite, knew he was about to part with fifty dollars’ worth of truth. In a perverted way, his honesty kept him alive day to day, the currency he exchanged for dollars.

  “I heard a guy crossed Beed a few months back down in Miami—don’t ask me how or why, ’cause I don’t know. I only tell you what I do know. Anyway, you ever see that movie where the dude who crossed the Mafia wakes up one fine morning and finds a horse’s head next to him in bed?”

  Carver nodded.

  “Well, this guy in Miami found his wife’s head resting on her pillow like usual, but nothing else under the covers. Still ain’t found the rest of her.” Brethwaite’s lips danced as he stared hard at Carver. “That give you an idea what kinda geek you’re looking for?”

  Carver handed him the fifty, then turned around and limped back to the car. His stomach didn’t feel so good, and he hated the fear that hindered his limbs like arthritis.

  “Helluva movie, anyway,” Brethwaite said behind him, an instant before the trailer’s flimsy door slammed shut and rattled.

  Carver was in more of a mood for a musical.

  18

  AFTER LEAVING LOU BRETHWAITE, Carver phoned Lloyd Van Meter from a booth on Silver Star Road. Van Meter was one of the more successful private investigators in Florida, with offices in Miami, Tampa, and Orlando. He agreed to meet Carver that evening at Bixby’s Lounge on Magnolia Avenue.

  The night was hot and thick as gauze when Carver parked in Bixby’s lot, then limped into the lounge through the wide entrance flanked by flickering neon palm trees.

  It was almost cold in Bixby’s; it felt like ice being applied where Carver’s shirt was plastered to his flesh with perspiration. The spacious main room was starting to fill with the late-night crowd. Most of the round tables were occupied, the five-piece band had started playing, and half a dozen couples were dancing slowly on the small square floor in back. It wouldn’t be long before the music and the dancing would accelerate in noise and motion. Right now, Carver thought, Bixby’s seemed comparatively peaceful. Stillness before storm.

  It was easy to spot Van Meter’s 300-plus pounds perched on a stool near the end of the long mahogany and glass-brick bar. He was wearing a green suit with a muted gray chalk stripe, green leather loafers with silver-tipped toes, a yellow shirt with what looked in the back bar mirror to be a red and green tie. He noticed Carver in the mirror and turned and smiled. He had a broad face and flowing white beard that with his bulk lent him an authoritative, biblical air, like
one of those color illustrations in a dime-store religious tract. His commanding presence, his vivid awning-size clothes, as usual took Carver aback for a moment. There sat Moses sipping a beer after a spree through the K-mart men’s department.

  They shook hands and Carver took the stool next to him, hooking the crook of his cane over the bar’s leather elbow rest. The bartender came and took his order for a Budweiser.

  “You seem agitated,” Van Meter said. “Your same feisty self only more so.”

  “I’ve got a problem,” Carver said.

  “Guys like you have always got those.”

  “His name’s Adam Beed.”

  Van Meter stroked his beard, sipped his beer. “That’s a problem, all right.”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “Sure. In a darkly legendary way. Like Vlad the Impaler. Never met the legend and I got no desire to.” He grinned at Carver. “But I guess I’m gonna, right?”

  “Not exactly,” Carver said. “I only need you to locate him.” The bartender brought his Bud, poured exactly half of it into a glass as carefully as if it were an explosive, and walked away. Carver lifted the glass, said “Cheers,” and downed most of the beer.

  “Why would you want to find Adam Beed?” Van Meter asked.

  “Because he found me,” Carver said.

  Van Meter stared at him but didn’t push it.

  “Has to do with a job I’m on out in Solartown,” Carver said. He gave Van Meter a brief summary of the case.

  “The old folks at play,” Van Meter said. Then he glanced at his hulking gray reflection in the mirror and sighed. “Well, I’m getting there myself. Just like you, Fred. Like us all.”

  Carver didn’t want to wax melancholy over advancing age. He said, “My drug contacts aren’t going to do me any good. Beed’s a physical health nut, a weight lifter and martial arts expert in a major way. He’s also off illegal narcotics, making his drug of choice alcohol these days. Fanatically disciplined as he is, and worshiping his own muscles, he must have a helluva battle with booze. Control freaks always do. And there seems no doubt he’s an alcoholic.”